Damsels in Distress (again)

I re-watched this movie; it’s still enjoyable after repeated viewings. And so amazing that the entire movie was filmed in Staten Island (except for the final Sambola dance). Staten Island could be a really nice place if it weren’t for all the guidos, the housing projects on the north shore, and if it weren’t such a hellishly long commute to Manhattan.

Will Romney support Chris Christie?

The NY Times reports:

He is scheduled to have dinner with Mr. Christie on Friday evening, according to two people with knowledge of his schedule, suggesting that Mr. Romney may be considering throwing his support, and that of his own political operation, to Mr. Christie. The two men are friendly, and Mr. Christie, along with Mr. Bush, was a main rival of Mr. Romney for the favor of the Republican establishment.

Perhaps, a year ago, I overestimated the impact Bridgegate.

A sad day for politics

Mitt Romney has withdrawn. Romney is the most qualified guy in the Republican Party. No Republican with any chance of being elected would make a better president than Romney.

In an apparent jab at former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is 61, Romney emphasized the need for a fresh face for the GOP.

“I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started, may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democrat nominee,” he told supporters on the call. “In fact, I expect and hope that to be the case.”

I guess that Huck is also part of the old generation and not next generation.

However, Romney has not been a good student of past Republican primary seasons. Fresh faces never win the nomination. The nominee is always someone who has been around and is well known. I think that only leaves Jeb Bush and Huckabee.

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I would like Huckabee a lot better if he would drop his support for the “Fair Tax.” It’s unwise to mess with the income tax. It lowers his gravitas to be behind such a thing.

Fatness and intranational migration

In the comments, there is often talk about the fattening of America, yet I hardly see any fat white people in Manhattan. Thus I came up with the theory, this morning, that thin people are moving to Manhattan and other thin cities such as Washington, Boston, and San Francisco/Silicon Valley, leaving the fat people behind in the rest of the country. Those readers who live in the rest of the country are, therefore, getting the false impression that the population as a whole, is fatter than it really is.

There is also dysgenic breeding for fatness, because thin people in cities get married late, if at all, and have few children, while the fat proles in the rest of the country are a lot more fertile.

To become a successful writer, become wealthy first

That’s the refreshingly honest lesson from Ann Bauer who explains how she never had much time or energy to write anything until she married a rich husband at the age of 40, and then her writing career really took off. She presents having financial independence as the default situation for most successful writers who have wealthy and/or connected parents and attend prestigious universities.

Unfortunately, no one is telling middle-class kids and young adults that, no, they can’t be a writer. Ann presents the reality that people who inherit money hide it and pretend like they made it on their own, which tricks young people into pursuing careers they simply can’t afford because they are clueless that the successful people in those careers have financial independence because of their parents or sometimes their spouses.

Subprime auto loans

There was an article in yesterday’s NY Times about subprime auto loans. Those are auto loans to poor people at what some would considered to be usurious interest rates.

I think that Wikipedia has a good definition of usury: “Usury is the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender. A loan may be considered usurious because of excessive or abusive interest rates or other factors.”

Libertarian types would argue that there’s no such thing as usury. They would say that poor people are making wise decisions based on their need for a car to get to work so that they can build a career and a life for themselves, thus the car is an investment in their future that has a higher net present value benefit than the net present value of the future loan repayments.

The reality is that the vast majority of poor people taking out these loans have low intelligence and/or low future-time orientation, and they probably irrationally overvalue having a blingy car. This is demonstrated by one of the poor people mentioned in the article, “a former administrative assistant in the New York Police City Department, has not made a single payment on a $30,770 Santander loan that was taken out to buy a 2011 BMW 328xi. Ms. Payne, who has no driver’s license, said she took out the loan so her daughter, who lives in New Jersey, could have a car.” Even if her daughter needed a car really badly, she could have purchased a car she could afford such as a used Ford Fiesta.

I strongly suspect that most subprime auto borrowers are more like the woman in the story buying cars they don’t need and can’t afford than the wise net-present-value-maximizers envisioned by clueless libertarians.

Star Trek: TNG, S01E05

In this episode we are introduced to the Ferengi. The impressions I got watching it yesterday evening is the same one I got when I watched the episode for the first time more than 26 years ago. How could these types of creatures have ever have made it into space when they exhibit such low cooperation and future-time orientation? The Ferengi homeworld should be like Africa and not a technologically advanced society which can manufacture spaceships and transporters.

The Ferengi are also presented as capitalists always in search of “profit.” By presenting the galaxy’s primary proponents of capitalism and financial independence as cowardly and avaricious clowns, the writers are making a statement about what sort of economic system they prefer, and it’s not the free market.

Of course, they may have the point. With replicators and infinite energy produced by anti-matter thingamabobs, the future is truly a post-scarcity economy, so people should have higher aspirations in life than profit. They should self-actualize by joining a military organization such as Starfleet and hope that they aren’t one of the guys in the red uniforms who always get killed.

Epic bust, part II

Hardly any snow, no wind at all. Why are subways still suspended? De Blasio is a moron. When I was a kid, a minor snowfall like this wouldn’t even have canceled school.

Epic bust

Please ignore last post. No snow. De Blasio is going to feel bad about all the kids starving at home because he closed the schools and they can’t get a free hot meal.

What happened to global warming?

HUGE blizzard approaching NYC. Temperatures in the low 20s.